How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective

(Paperback, 2nd Revised edition)

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"If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free."
-Combahee River Collective Statement

Winner of the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction

, a path-breaking group of radical black feminists, was one of the most important organizations to develop out of the antiracist and women's liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s. In this collection of essays and interviews edited by activist-scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, founding members of the organization and contemporary activists reflect on the legacy of its contributions to Black feminism and its impact on today's struggles.

, and other publications. Taylor is Assistant Professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University.

Reviews

"This new collection of a four-decades-old text reminds us that black women have long known that America's destiny is inseparable from how it treats them and the nation ignores this truth at its peril."

--The New York Review of Books


"A striking collection that should be immediately added to the Black feminist canon."

--Bitch Media


"An essential book for any feminist library."

--Library Journal


"The publication of How We Get Free marks the 40th anniversary of the Combahee River Collective statement, which is often said to be the foundational document of intersectional feminism. As white feminism has gained an increasing amount of coverage, there are still questions as to how black and brown women's needs are being addressed. This book, through a collection of interviews with prominent black feminists, provides some answers."
--Rachael Revesz, The Independent


"For feminists of all kinds, astute scholars, or anyone with a passion for social justice, How We Get Free is an invaluable work."
--Ethnic and Racial Studies Journal

Author Bio

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is the author of Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, a semi-finalist for the 2019 National Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2020, and From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, winner of the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book in 2016. She is also editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, which won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBQT nonfiction in 2018. She is a 2021 MacArthur Foundation Fellow. Taylor is a contributing writer at The New Yorker, a former contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, and her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Boston Review, Paris Review, Guardian, The Nation, Jacobin, and Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, among others. Taylor is Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University.